The Femininity of Moll Flanders

T h e F em in in ity o f M o ll F la n d ers K A T H L E E N M c C O Y mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA De foe’s M o ll F landers is not only a document by which to mark the development of English prose fiction, it also introduced into English literature a new and apparently unprecedented female character. Moll Flanders emerges full-blown and highly specified without any readily recognizable literary antecedents in the character types of the previous century. The book has been linked formally to the spiritual autobiog­ raphy and to the criminal biography or confession, but neither of these influences can account fully for the complexity and difficulty which recent controversy about the novel and its heroine seems to indicate. The last two decades of critical discussion of Moil F landers have established only that the novel is not so simple to read nor so easy to assess as earlier readers assumed. It has become impossible to dismiss it, as Leslie Stephen did in the last century, as a mere accumulation of dull facts. It is equally inadequate to call it “indisputably great,” the praise of Virginia Woolf. In 1957, Ian W att,1 arguing that Moll Flan­ ders’ values were probably very similar to Defoe’s, concluded that al­ though Defoe was “a master illusionist,” nevertheless he was not a founder of the novel because his works lacked “a controlling moral intention.” He also felt that Moll was essentially not feminine. Ten years later, having marked the rise of critical interest in M o ll F landers, W att sorted out the areas of disagreement.2 The central issue was 413 414 / WVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA K A T H L E E N M c C O Y irony— intentional or unconscious, sustained, intermittent, or none at alt Most of those who credited Defoe with a high degree of artistic awareness found the novel consistently ironic. Those who continued to believe him naive saw that Defoe, not Moll, was the one whom the reader must laugh at and whose values the reader must reject. W att also raised again the question of Moll’s femininity. He still doubted “whether there really is such a thing as a specifically feminine charac­ ter.”3 However, this time he allowed the women to answer. He de­ ferred to the judgments of Virginia W oolf and Dorothy VanGhent that Moll is authentically a woman. W hile such a critical maneuver demonstrates that W att is a gentleman, it does little by way of answer­ ing the question, W hat makes a literary character feminine or not feminine? W oolf and VanGhent essentially disagree about Moll Flanders. Woolf, who supposed that Defoe was an “unconscious artist,” found in Moll an early desire for romance which was never allowed to flower, mostly because Moll is never allowed to settle down into a “subtle domestic atmosphere.” Her lack of delicacy is a product of her situa­ tion, which demands instead ambition, imagination, and a “robust understanding.” That is, she would be more feminine if she could. But just as Moll can waste no time on “refinements of personal affection,” so Defoe himself “never lingers or stresses any point of subtlety or pathos.”4 Although the hard conditions imposed by Moll’s circum­ stances do not permit her feminine nature to develop fully, W oolf implies that it might have developed as a leaning toward domesticity, refinement, affection, and emotional subtlety. By contrast, VanGhent calls Moll an “Earth Mother” and follows this nomination with a list of horrendous progeny “suitable to a waste­ land world.” Moll is female, rather than feminine, “a lusty, fullbodied , lively-sensed creature” with no “subjective life” but an insanely narrow focus on “financial abstractions.”5 Like many critics who see the novel as essentially ironic, VanGhent was much less charmed by Moll than was Woolf. Thus in Moll we can read either the lusty creature or the thwarted romantic. Arnold Kettle is able to see both. He has defended Moll on grounds that she “becomes a criminal be­ cause she is a woman.” She is “immoral, shallow, hypocritical, heart­ T h...